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Wikileaks, Anarchism and Technologies of Dissent

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Wikileaks, Anarchism and Technologies of Dissent WikiLeaks, Anarchism and Technologies of Dissent Giorel Curran School of Government and International Relations, Griffith University, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; g.curran@griffith.edu.au Morgan Gibson School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; [email protected] Abstract: WikiLeaks is a controversial organisation that attracts polarised responses. This is not unexpected given its key objective of exposing the secrets and social control ambitions of the powerful. While its supporters laud its pursuit of an informational commons, its detractors condemn its antisocial character, its megalomania—and its anarchism. It is the latter that particularly interests us here. This paper treats the “charge” of anarchism seriously, however, giving it the analytical attention it warrants. It does this by first identifying those characteristics of the organisation that would render it anarchist, and then to conceptualise what this anarchism means. It highlights two important elements of the WikiLeaks story: the anarchical character of the technologies it utilises to foment its dissent; and the anarchical ethos of the organisation’s radical politics. We conclude by also considering the tensions and contradictions in WikiLeaks that temper both its anarchism and its social change objectives. Keywords: anarchism, WikiLeaks, cyberspace, technology, dissent Introduction WikiLeaks emerged on the global political stage in earnest in 2010 when it leaked a large number of secret government documents and made them available through its Internet site. The response was loud and immediate, and either highly condemnatory or highly congratulatory. Since its inception several years ago, WikiLeaks has aimed at the direct exposure of the secrets that underpin statist institutions’ social control ambitions. As the organisation’s “editor-in-chief”, Julian Assange charged that “a world wide movement of mass leaking is the most cost effective political intervention” for challenging a widespread “governance by conspiracy and fear” (in Gellman 2011). The reaction, from government quarters at least, was unsurprisingly strident and disparaging. Among the general public, however, the reaction was more mixed; ranging from the appalled condemnation some shared with governments, to those who lauded the democratic commitment to information transparency that the organisation seemingly championed. Many of WikiLeaks’ detractors framed their criticism in terms of the organisation’s criminality, its wilful disregard for national and global security, its megalomaniacal Antipode Vol. 45 No. 2 2013 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 294–314 doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8330.2012.01009.x C 2012 The Author. Antipode C 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd. WikiLeaks, Anarchism and Technologies of Dissent 295 character—and its anarchism. Indeed, a spokesperson for the US State Department, P. J. Crowley, intent on fomenting a negative characterisation of WikiLeaks, declared that Assange “is not a journalist” or “a whistleblower”; he is “a political actor ... [with] a political agenda ...an anarchist” (Indianexpress.com 2010). As general criticism the charge of anarchism is often used loosely and pejoratively, meant to signify the organisation’s antisocial temperament, and its preparedness to sully the norms and practices of a decent social order. This paper is interested in WikiLeaks’ characterisation as anarchist but treats the charge more substantively than is usually the intent of these general critics. In this paper we thus seek to identify those characteristics of the organisation that would render it anarchist and then to conceptualise what its anarchism means. The story we tell in this paper also has important spatial dimensions. This is because, first, it takes place within a new technological and cyberspatial landscape that has helped (re)shape the contours of contemporary lived experience, with the Internet—a technology that compresses space and time in novels ways— central to this story. As Dodge and Kitchin (2001:xi) observe: information and communication technologies and the cyberspace environment they inhabit are today “radically restructuring the materiality and spatiality of space and ...and changing the way we live our lives ...regardless of whether we actively use them”. While the nature, scope and implications of this “re-shaping” is highly contested, both within anarchist thought and society more broadly, most agree that these technologies have shaped the contours of economic, social and political life in significant ways—as the processes of globalisation well illustrate. Today’s flexible accumulation regime—enabled by the increasing mobility of capital flows across the globe—necessarily alters “the relationship between the territoriality of political power and the spatiality of capital accumulation” (Harvey in Schouten 2008:1). WikiLeaks seeks to mount a counter-response to the forces of neoliberal globalisation and the re-worked geographies of inequality and domination that occur in its name. Since the new technologies are an important driver of today’s globalised landscape, “hacker” organisations such as WikiLeaks inject their struggle both through the use of the new technologies, and against the kind of world they have more recently enabled. There is another reason why the spatial dimension is important to the anarchist story we tell here. As Crampton (2003:1–2) points out, “[s]ocial life is inherently spatial ...we live in, open up, shape, and are shaped by, spaces and places”. Anarchists observe that many of these spaces are colonised by dominant powers that set out to shape these spaces in ways that reinforce their domination. Anarchism’s emancipatory focus is hence on the creation of decentralised “free spaces” that challenge prevailing hierarchical and centralised arrangements (see Breitbart 2009). Since anarchists are fundamentally concerned with “the qualities of life of particular places”, David Harvey observes that “the tradition in geography of radicalism” is necessarily anarchist (in Williams 2007). As we discuss, the new technologies offer opportunity for counter-appropriation for emancipatory ends, and this is precisely the opportunity WikiLeaks’ eyes off. This paper thus focuses on two key components of the telling of the WikiLeaks story through an anarchist prism: the anarchical elements of the computer-mediated C 2012 The Author. Antipode C 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd. 296 Antipode technologies that are utilised, particularly the Internet, and the anarchical ethos of the organisation’s politics. We argue that the interrelated character of these two components is important to understanding the nature of the organisation’s anarchical temperament. Anarchism is, of course, a multifaceted and wide-ranging ideology with “a broad back”; boasting many well know actors and theorists from a range of political backgrounds and positions (see Curran 2006; Gordon 2007a; Guerin 1970; Kinna 2005; Marshall 1993; Rocker 1938). Its political philosophy has seldom commanded the respect of the other ‘major’ ideologies such as liberalism and Marxism, however, with its oeuvre often dismissed as fanciful and its views treated with considerable suspicion, as the current treatment of WikiLeaks highlights. While a robust discussion of anarchism is outside the scope of this paper, and while the identification of its core values runs the risk of simplifying what is in actuality a complex political composition, some isolation of key principles is necessary at the outset in order to proceed with this paper’s narrative. The principles of liberty and autonomy are central to anarchism, and since the state is viewed as the acme of centralised and institutionalised authority, anarchists, by and large, resist it. The tenor of this resistance helps describe the many different varieties and expressions of anarchism. Anarchists are alert to the forces that would trample freedom and agency—particularly the forces of institutional mediation, centralisation and hierarchy. Their anti-authoritarianism (which assumes many forms), and their championing of a necessary correspondence between means and ends, is thus directed towards protecting their animating principles. Throughout the paper we also distinguish between the terms “anarchist” and “anarchical”. This reflects our sympathies for some of the more recent scholarship on contemporary anarchism which, generally, distinguishes some actors’ robust ideological embrace of anarchism from those inspired by the force of its analyses and animating principles. For example, Neal (1997) distinguishes between “small a” and “capital A” (or highly ideological) anarchism, a distinction that Graeber (2002) also embraces in part to support his characterisation of “the new anarchists” in the anti-globalisation movement. Utilising similarly conceptualised distinctions, Epstein (2001) talks of anarchism per se and anarchist sensibilities, while Curran (2006) theorises a “post-ideological” anarchism, which refers to the looser and less doctrinal embrace of anarchist ideas and strategies by actors who do not necessarily identify as, in effect, “card-carrying” anarchists. To discuss WikiLeaks’ relationship to anarchism, the paper is divided into three main sections. The first section discusses the theoretical and historical background that informs the WikiLeaks story in important ways. Here it first discusses the anarchical Internet and the emergence of the anarchical hacker cultures that helped shape it; hackers
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